Quadripartite entangled state from cascaded second-harmonic generation

A generation system of continuous-variable (CV) quadripartite entangled state based on two cascaded second-harmonic generation (SHG) cavities below the threshold is investigated. Two reflected fundamental beams of the first cavity, the reflected second-harmonic beam and the output fourth-harmonic beam of the second cavity are proved to be entangled, and the dependence of the entanglement degree on the normalized frequency, pump parameter, fourth-harmonic loss parameter, and second-harmonic loss parameter is also analyzed. Due to the fact that the cavity parameters and the nonlinear crystals of the two SHG cavities can be freely chosen, the practicality of the proposed protocol is relatively perfect and the system can also be extended to the preparation of multicolor entangled states for a quantum network.